Supporting research, training and practice, past and present: An Overview

From its inception in 1966 the Planned Environment Therapy Trust has been an outward-looking charity, making grants to a variety of institutions and individuals in support of developments in practice, research, and therapy.

From the mid to late 1990s most of the Trust's charitable activity has been focused through the Archive and Study Centre it created in 1989, with overt grants to students and researchers in particular, but in the background organising and subsidising meetings, publications and a wide-range of activities as a kind of stabilising and networking utility in what has been a remarkable and turbulent period for therapeutic environments - a period which has seen the birth and florescence of the Community of Communities on the one hand and the creation of The Consortium of Therapeutic Communities, and the closure of such deeply rooted centres of best practice as the Cambridge Young Persons Service, The Cotswold Community, and the iconic Henderson Hospital on the other. Remove PETT's contribution from this period, and how does the landscape change?

As an outwardly-looking charity, PETT has not had a tradition of sitting down to sum up what it has given in concrete financial terms to institutions and individuals over the years. Even the proposal in 1985 to keep a Register of Bursaries to try to keep up with everyone who was being supported does not seem to have been followed up.

We do know that in 1967 it spent the 2012 equivalent of around £5,000 providing consultancy for the newly-opened Conyborough School for maladjusted children; and that between 1970 and 1972 it provided funding for 144 seminars, lectures and staff training sessions for a number of therapeutic environments for children and young people - Conyborough, Farney Close, Kinsgmuir, Lingfield Hospital School, the Cotswold Community, and Boxwood.

In 1973 it turned its attention to adult work, providing another 2012 equivalent of £5,000 for Dennie Briggs' consultancy with the Gloucester Probation After Care Project, renamed The Barbican Centre and supported again to the same amount the following year.

It supported the Cotswold Community's experimental Hostel in Oxford in a variety of ways, including a 1973 grant for £50 for furniture and equipment, a 2012 equivalent of about £500. Rather characteristically, in the following year the Trust subsidised the publication of a paper by Cotswold Community director Richard Balbernie in the Journal of the Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children - a form of indirect enabling support which it was to employ in facilitating the publication later of books, such as David Clark's "Story of a Mental Hospital" and Bob Hinshelwood's "What Happens in Groups", as well as the Association of Therapeutic Communities' Journal. It employed loans converted into grants to support other publication ventures, such as Robert Young's Free Association Books, later supporting his Process Press; and supported the Therapeutic Child Care Course at the University of Reading over many years through subsidising the subscriptions to specialist journals, and the purchase of books for the library.

In 1977 trustee and Birmingham University academic Robert Laslett saved the Trust a 2012 equivalent of some £80,000 by carrying out himself a follow-up study of three schools for maladjusted children, and over 1976-1978 it made its first direct grants for individual training and travel - the first grant in 1976 being to a "Mrs. Anne Brown" for a 2012 equivalent of about £1,500. Having subsidised the organising costs and worked together with the Association of Therapeutic Communities to hold the seminal "Conference on Environment Therapy" at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park in 1978, it set aside a significant amount of money for potential bursaries for subsequent conferences. Its grant to Spencer Millham at the Dartington Research Unit enabled the publication of "Learning to Care" in 1980, which was focused on the training of workers in Residential Work.

This introduced a newer thread: A departure from - or addition to - direct funding of individuals, and the support of new trainings and courses as such, underwriting "The Study Course" in 1980, and giving a grant to the ATC in 1983 to enable it to launch its part-time training course for students - to which PETT also added a further grant for bursaries. In the early 1980s it made substantial bursary grants for Bristol University's Therapeutic Child Care Course, and courses at the National Institute of Social Work. Regular and significant bursaries and awards were made to Reading University's Therapeutic Child Care Course from its inception in 1991, quite apart from the Library grants; funding essay prizes both to benefit students and the ATC Journal. Throughout the 90s the Trust also funded Arbours Association Fellowships, to facilitate students' in-practice training, as well as bursaries for psychotherapy training.

The relationship with Arbours blossomed in other directions: The first funding, continued throughout the 90s, for actual therapeutic placements; substantial grants for renovation and building, including a beautiful new large group room in the grounds of the Crisis Centre. The latter extended further, and in 1996 the Trust provided a grant to the Philadelphia Association for the development of a new community house.

Indeed, the 1990s saw a rich array of grants: To Dartmouth House Therapeutic Community; to the Women's Therapy Centre; to Young Minds; to the Association of Therapeutic Communities; to the Voice of the Child in Care; to the University of Greenwich, for a PETT Fellowship.

The commitment to the Archive and Study Centre and to the facilities being created there - an irreplaceable Research Library; professional provision for archives and their storage, preservation, management, and use; the oral history programme; the support to the field in the blossoming world of computers and the Internet; a base for the Association of Therapeutic Communities and the provision of information and response - funneled the Trust's grant-making activities.

In 1996 it created an Archive Fellowship, an annual grant of £2,000, through which Dr. Lesley Caldwell in the first instance, and Professor Lawrence Friedman of Indiana University in the second, each had two years of support from the Trust: Dr. Caldwell's to enable her to engage with the Cassel Hospital archives and to dive into the living memories of those who had worked there with and after Tom Main; and Professor Friedman's, to support his research into the connections between psychological/clinical theory on the one hand and social/emotional life on the other in wartime and immediate postwar Britain.

A wide range of travel and related grants in funds and kind were given especially to young researchers, such as John Hopton, whose travel grant in 1997 enabled him to interview David Clark of Fulbourn Hospital and Michael Conran of Villa 21; or Helen Spandler, working on her PhD in relation to the Paddington Day Centre in 1999, receiving a travel grant and the transciption of her recordings; Nafsika Thalassis; Stijn Vandevelde, of Ghent University in Belgium, supporting work on his thesis related to Maxwell Jones.

The Archive routinely provided (and provides) subsidy through transcription of interviews, such as those which had been carried out by Marcello Marcario in the 1980s with Joseph Berke, Robin Cooper, Elly Jansen, Stuart Whiteley, and Harold Bourne; Lucy Jaffe's recordings for the history of Forest School; Maddy Loat's recordings at the Cassel Hospital for her PhD. It has subsidised translations, such as Dieuwke Twinberrow's translation of Stijn Vandevelde's thesis from the Dutch into English, to make it more accessible; Axel Kuhn's translation from the Swedish of a paper by Gudrun Bjork.

It has loaned its professional recording equipment to many of those named, and others (Chris Beedell, Sheila Gatiss, Dennie Briggs, Hussein Lucas, Alan Fox...), including a long-term loan to the Squiggle Foundation of a Sony professional audiocassette recorder which enabled them to make high-quality recordings of their regular lectures and seminars; and even made a long-term loan of a mini-disc machine to Andy Vivian of BBC Radio Gloucestershire, to enable him to make copies of his Millenium oral history project oral history interviews for deposit in the National Sound Archives and the Gloucestershire Record Office.

There has also been the Archive's tradition of "fieldwork", a policy of making grants of advice, materials and labour to people who hold private collections of records, where these records relate significantly to the broad concerns of PETT, where these records will subsequently be made available to bona fide researchers, with a priority to those where the possibility exists that they might eventually come into the Archive, as did those of Josephine Lomax-Simpson and the Messenger House Trust; and the Birmingham Society for the Care of Invalid and Nervous Children. Although less feasible now as the work of the Archive has expanded and resources contracted, the service at its high point enabled the Archive to locate records and assess their vulnerability, and then, if the owner was willing, to list the collections and carry out simple first aid, removing rusting paper clips and arresting any other obvious decay. We were then able to provide archival storage materials - sleeves, folders and boxes, and no small cost - in order to ensure that their immediate environment at least protected them and was non-destructive of them. Advice was (and is) routinely given on the best conditions for subsequent storage, and for ways in which the collection can or could be managed should researchers wish to use it.

PETT has never before sat down to make an account of what it has given financially and otherwise to all of the individuals, institutions, and organisations which make up this wider field of therapeutic environments, and of educational environments which may not call themselves therapeutic - "democratic, progressive, alternative" - but at their best cannot help but function therapeutically; and to the wider society generally. It has taken itself and its gifts for granted, almost on principle. Indeed, this essay has only been possible through the help of Trustee Linnet McMahon and former Project Archivist Matt Naylor, who sat down with the 46 years+ of minutes in preparation for the 2012 PETTATHON, and helped us to discover - to scratch the surface - of what the Trust has given ot others. Because of our own short memories, even we did not know: It has blown our minds, and given us the confidence to ask for help ourselves now - so that we can continue to give to others in the creative, diverse, exciting and essential ways we have begun to record throughout this website.

As the archivist, Craig Fees, said in The Joint Newsletter some years ago, quoting the Latin: "Do ut possis dare": Give, to make it possible for us to give in return.